"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

San Pedro Garza Garcia

Category: Pets

Dobermans and lab tests

Lorena went with me to my annual lab test appointment. There was a lady there who had a Dobermann Pinscher service dog. He was nothing short of spectacular. His owner gave him her business card to carry to Lorena, then gave him one to carry to me. The picture is of him delivering it to me. He was a joy to watch. The magnitude of these kinds of dogs was impressed on my like never before. It is one thing to see them in a demonstration, but is a whole other thing to see it all up close and personal. It was also impressed on me that these are not pets but working dogs and they love their jobs.

Neighborhood greeters

These are my two new friends who sing to me on my daily walks whenever they are outside and they feel like it. Sometimes they do not feel like it. Beautiful dogs! There must be one of those wires around the yard that sends a signal to their collars to give them a little shock if they get to close. They just look like happy dogs.

My walks have been going great. I have many hours of audio books I got from the Hood County Library Bookstore. It makes the whole process more enjoyable. I am trying to up my game to walk seven days per week and when I actually accomplish that it really pays off.

Kiwi enjoying retirement

We are not sure exactly how old Kiwi is, but we know it is in the range of 15-16 years old. She cannot really do a lot of jumping up on things anymore, but she is very healthy. She has a good appetite, is very social, and keeps a precise, clockwork-like schedule. I feed here when I get up in the morning at five or so, then she eats again at noon and six pm. The one thing she does a lot more than she did in the past is sleep. I think that is probably just an artifact of her age. We are pretty sure she is getting toward the end so we are enjoying her as much as possible while she is still here. She sat on our laps in our church meeting (online because of COVID19) this morning.

Working with Kiwi

Being stuck in the house for days on end does not seem to bother Kiwi. We get so many things shipped to us now that we used to go to the store to buy that she has a ton more opportunities to sleep in confined places. We have found that the antidote to her trying to sleep on our hands while we are typing is to put a small box close to the computer. She cannot resist. Right now, I am hard at work on an article that, hopefully will make it to a refereed journal and then into my dissertation. It is nice to have a companion in my work, but it is a lot easier when she is not trying to sleep on my hands.

Kiwi getting older

Lorena took Kiwi down to PetSmart to get her shots and to get groomed. We have been very worried about her. Her fur was getting matted, did not groom herself, and was very lethargic. We thought she was at the end. After getting her shots, she is a new “person.” She cleans herself, has more energy, and has been playing and purring a lot more. She never quit purring but she did it with a lot let less energy. We think the shots she got defeated some kind of condition or bug she might have had. We are truly glad she is feeling better. We don’t like to think about not having her.

Morning routine with Kiwi

I usually get up very early because I need to coordinate my work with the people in the Boston office, a three hour difference from where we leave. Fortunately (or unfortunately–however one looks at it), Kiwi is an earlier riser, too. The thing is, she only rises long enough to park herself on my lap when I start work. After 10-15 minutes, she gets irritated with me moving around to much for her to sleep, so she moves to the area between the keyboard and the monitor. That is way more manageable because the most I usually have to do is push her head down when I cannot see something on the screen.

Kiwi’s mani-pedi

Kiwi is getting older and her grooming skills are not what they used to be so Lorena ran her down to the local PetCo to bring her shots up to date. While she was there, she scheduled a bath, grooming, and toenail clipping. Kiwi hates that kind of thing, but she is easier to manage this time than when she was younger. She was given a clean bill of health and even though she is a little out of sorts, she now longer has matted hair, her toenails do not scratch up everything in their path and she smells very nice. Here she is waiting for her ride home. It would have been impossible to let her free in the car when she was younger, but not she sits there nicely. I think the motion of the car puts her to sleep. We plan to do this again every 2-3 months now.

Entitled cats

We are not the only ones in our area suffering the effects of cat entitlement! We laughed hard when Gena sent this picture along. Now that Christian is here Kiwi is acting even MORE entitled and we wonder that that is even possible. Maybe we ought to invite the eagles in to have a chat with her. In the end, the only workable solution I could find to actually be able to use the computer is to raise up my monitor a little and make some space between the monitor and the keyboard so she had a place to recline. That does not work so well when one uses their laptop only.

Wildlife from the office window


I hope I never get tired of seeing this out my office window. As I write this, I am looking at a doe and her fawn eating plums and apples a little bit further out in the yard.

Kiwi installed in new office


Kiwi was a little suspicious at first. She really never liked to go downstairs, because we never really went there. It took several hours, but when she saw my office had officially moved, she made her way down and installed herself at her usual location on my desk below the monitor.

A box of Kiwi

And of course, whenever we get new boxes, we cannot throw them away for several days because it gets immediately inhabited. Lorena said Kiwi sat slept in the box all day, only coming out for food.

Neighborhood cat truce


The first gazillion times the neighbor’s tomcat came by for a visit, Kiwi threw a hissy-fit (literally). It has been tapering off for awhile and now is to the point where the neighbor cat, Jack, sits outside the screen door while Kiwi lounges somewhere within view and they stare at each other (or not) for hours on end.

La limosnera

Kiwi gets up at 4:00 AM every morning to do the hard work of being irritating enough to wake us up and keep us awake long enough so that we can lock her into the laundry room to get just a little more sleep. At about 6:00 AM, one of us gets up and feeds her and lets her out of the laundry room. We get a brief reprieve until about about 10:00 AM when the process starts over again. We give her lunch at about 11:30 after which she harasses us to give her part of our lunch until we lock her into the laundry room again so we can have enough peace and quiet to enjoy our lunch. That peace and quiet really does not happen because she makes such a racket through the hollow core laundry room door. After lunch, she takes a nap for another couple hours because she knows she will have to start in again at 4:00 PM so we will feed her on schedule at 6:00. This is our life.

Bald eagle from the living room

Warren K. took some very cool pictures of the bald eagle that sits on the tree behind our house sometimes to fish down in the Chehalis River below us. He took the picture with his Samsung S8 phone looking through the spotting scope Bob so kindly lent us. We thought the pictures were amazing. The bird certainly was.

Our bald eagle is back

Bald eagle again, but with binoculars

Our bald eagle friend came back today and we took a picture of him with our digital binoculars. We are really glad we got them, but can see we need to get better ones or a telescope. We think we want to go the telescope route and equip it with a real machine vision style camera. We were glad our eagle came back, too. Now we know we might get to see him every now and then.

I cannot believe I am a cat pictures guy

Kiwi monopolizes the office chairI think I have a very good excuse for not getting much done this weekend. Every time I wanted to sit down to the computer to get something done, Kiwi was already in place. The thing I realized when I first took this picture that with respect to the Internet, I am part of the problem. I cannot deny that I love to post cat pictures. Actually, it was a very nice hiatus from technology for a weekend. All I did was eat, read and do a pretty serious workout on Saturday. I am not at Lorena’s level nor do I ever expect to get there, but she is definitely shaming me into pushing a little harder. She did it again today and is well on her way to the next level.

In the meantime, I have new side projects stacking up everywhere. Now that I have my code running and a plan to get it pushed over to a BeagleBone Black and up on the Internet, I need to not let my other side projects get in the way so I can mark at least one more thing as done.  I hope Kiwi does not steal my chair again next weekend.

Christian has the most loyal cat I have ever seen

Rubix, Christian's loyal cat

Christian’s cat, Rubix hates everyone in the family except Christian.  Lorena especially annoys here by trying to give her tight hugs all the time.  She is amazingly dedicated to Christian–almost like a dog.  She comes and sits on his lap, computer, book, or anything Christian is using so she can just be with him.  She has been the dominant cat in the Rubix-Kiwi nexus, but that has been changing lately.  Somehow, when we switched from dry cat food to canned cat food Rubix got dramatically more passive and Kiwi got dramatically more interested in getting fed.

At first we thought it was because she was not getting enough to eat, but she is definitely not losing any weight, so now we think it is because she really, REALLY likes the canned cat food.  We made the switch because the vet said we should.  We hope it is helping Rubix lose weight, but for her, it is too early to tell.  We read up on the behavior and found that dominance can change in these kinds of cases,  The funny deal is that even though Rubix is less dominant, Kiwi does not seem to have gotten more dominant–just annoying when she comes to meow for cat food at 5:30 every morning.  It has gotten bad enough that Lorena has put a spray bottle filled with water beside our bed.  Cats and Mexican wives make for lots of drama in the household.

Does anyone notice anything suspicious about this image

Day 103 of 1000

Lorena put some decorations on the dollhouse and got a little unsolicited “help”.
Rubix in the dollhouse

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